


Line Drawings

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Speculative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 19:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2400116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an attempt at seeing Mycroft and Sherlock in a layered way, with various eyes seeing things. It's not as complex as it could be, and not as simple as it may appear. Have fun, mes enfants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Line Drawings

“Whoa, coming up in the world,” John said, looking around Lestrade’s office. It was the first time he’d been in since Lestrade’s promotion. John tried to pretend he wasn’t uncomfortable at the distance he’d put between himself and all those who’d shared his friendship with Sherlock. He was, though. Sherlock was back, and John was pleased—but the pain and loss and the empty days of his absence remained, and so, somehow, did the uneasy anger and pain at seeing their old friends.

Lestrade glanced around. “Eh. Not all that great. I’m told the new place will be a sight better, but—it’s an office, yeah?”*

“No mistaking it,” Mary murmured, her face poker-straight, though her eyes danced.

“Still not unpacked, really,” Lestrade said, looking around. There were Met evidence boxes all over the room, tucked into corners and shoved under the table at the side of the room. “Seemed like such a waste of effort when I’m just going to have to pack again anyway.”

“Could we please stop nattering on about meaningless trivia?” Sherlock growled, and flounced across the room, splatting down his own folder of information into the middle of the tiny island of free space in the middle of Lestrade’s desk. “We should review the autopsy information. There are clues there. John—attend, please!”

Mary caught his eye and winked, as she perched on the spare table. “You go right ahead. I’ll listen.” She leaned over sideways, though, and began riffling through the miscellaneous items in the nearest open evidence box.

John smiled, and pulled a chair up beside Lestrade’s desk, and was soon inundated with photos, notes, and focused questions from Sherlock and Lestrade as they asked him to interpret and translate the information from multiple autopsies. It was a finicky business involving some very uncertain issues. What was the nature of the implement used to slice away the flesh over the ribcage? And why? Was there a medical procedure suggested, or was it some odd form of trophy-taking? The implement was insanely sharp, but left signs of having an irregularly jagged edge.

Mary, bless her, was the one who identified it in the end. Wandering over with a folder in her hand, she leaned over, and said, surprised, “Bloody hell. You’ve got a flint-knapper. Or a killer who knows one.”

“What?” Sherlock said, head coming up fast. “A…”

“Flint-knapper. From the looks of that it’s a flint knife with a chipped edge.” She cocked her head and squinted, adding, “Or maybe obsidian. That’s sharp—really sharp. The cuts are clean, in spite of the irregular edge.”

“Flint?” Lestrade squawked. “Bloody flint? How do you know?”

She looked at him, eyes cool, and said, quietly, “I did some wilderness survival training. Once.”

There were still things Lestrade didn’t know about Mary. Hell, there were things John didn’t know about Mary. But what he did know made the idea of survival training that included the production of flint weapons far from impossible. He was uneasily suspicious that she could make a lethal weapon from a cocktail umbrella, a domino and three rubber bands.

Sherlock’s eyes had narrowed—then gone distant as things fell into place.

“Who knows about flint-knapping,” he snapped to Mary, as though she’d have names and contact numbers tucked into her iPhone. She didn’t—but she did say, tartly, “This is London, sunshine. You’ve got how many universities here? Start with the paleo or anthro department of one, and follow the scent till you’ve got what you need.”

And before her sentence was finished, Sherlock was in action—in action so fast he left them all behind.

Lestrade blinked. “Think we should follow?”

John considered. If Sherlock wanted them, their phones would be buzzing and vibrating and pinging any time now. If not, he’d bite their heads off for slowing him down. “No,” he said. “He’ll call us when he wants us.” He looked at Mary, then, and at her folder. “What do you have there? Some cold case that interests you?”

She flashed him a sideways look, and shook her head, then laid it open on Lestrade’s desk, saying, “This is them, isn’t it? Mycroft and Sherlock?”

In the folder were a set of loose pages torn from various sketch notebooks. Whoever had done the art had a feel for figure drawing and portraiture.  Just glancing down John could see that the artist had grown and gained skill over the period of time during which the drawings had been sketched.

The freshest, newest paper showed Sherlock at about age twenty—and, yes, it was Sherlock who drew John’s eye. It appeared to have been drawn in someone’s home. John frowned, trying to decide if it was Mummy and Father Holmes’ place, but he couldn’t decide. All he could see was Sherlock, in jeans and long-sleeved Oxford shirt, with his violin. So young—and, sadly, so clearly on a raging high. His eyes burned, the motion trapped in the drawing threatened to explode off the page, his face grimaced with something between rage and ecstasy.

Only after he’d studied the vibrant little pencil portrait, avid for this image retrieved from Sherlock’s past, did he notice the figure in the background. Mycroft, mid-to-late twenties. His hair was neat—but one lock of his fringe had escaped and hung down over eyes dark with fear for his brother. John frowned. He tended to think of Mycroft as over-controlling and cold. Even knowing Mycroft had been Sehrlock’s collaborator, helping stage manage his “death” and watching over him during his absence hadn’t really helped. If anything it had added one more bitter grudge to John’s tally against Sherlock’s older brother. But the artist, whoever he or she was, had caught so much in the simple line drawing: youth, love, fear, reserve, hesitation, concern, grief…

“Who drew this?” he asked, looking at the  work. No med student failed to learn to recognize an artist with a good hand: far too much of note-taking and lab work involved the ability to jot useable drawings of specimens, of anatomical details. Whoever it was had worked with a fine-point mechanical pencil. John thought it was a bit softer than a number-two lead—darker, and a bit more sensitive to pressure and angle. The work was based on basic outline work with a supple, serpentine hand that created the illusion of texture and weight and layers, sometimes with nothing more than a twist of the tip, or a jump to create a new line butted up at a slight offset to the old. There was a bit of cross-hatch, but almost all the burden of the drawing was in that darting, seductive outline. The shape of a lip. The furrow of a brow. The tension in Sherlock’s fingers as he fretted the strings and bore down on the bow.  “Who did it?” he asked again, pulling the first drawing aside to move to the next page.

“I don’t know,” Lestrade said. Then, slowly, he added, “I found it in some of Sherlock’s stuff years ago. Before he ever met you, John. Back on Montague Street. He wouldn’t tell me who did it, though. Shoved it all into my hands and told me if I wanted it I was welcome to the sentimental garbage.” He pulled out the sheet John had freed, and sighed. “Mycroft won’t talk about it at all. Went white, and said, ‘Change the subject. Now,’ and turned his back on me.” He let his finger dust lightly over one of the many small sketches scattered over the page—a drawing of Mycroft as a young man, in loose trousers and a soft, open-necked shirt, hair tumbled easily, head thrown back, laughing. John let his eyes wander, finding a charming drawing of Sherlock at about thirteen, not quite past the age of soft, rounded cheeks and choir-boy innocence, grinning madly as he raced down a lightly traced path. The artist had just begun to rough in someone chasing behind. John thought it was Mycroft—the face looked like Mycroft’s, though it was so faint. There was a smile, though, in the right shaped face, with the right shaped eyes. In yet another little thumbnail Sherlock swung from a treebranch, all long arms and long legs and soft stomach showing as his shirt pulled up and his trousers slipped down and his belly hollowed out as he swung.

Mary touched another, whisper faint near the lower margin. “So sad, here,” she said.

It was a profile of Mycroft, in the very action of turning away—and, yes, there was something lonely and poignant about his expression.

“This one,” Lestrade said, pointing to a tiny, dark, fierce-lined drawing of Sherlock, caught between rage and tears. “I’ve seen him like that when he was high.”

“I’ve seen him like that a few times he wasn’t,” John said, and shivered. Sherlock had flashed that face for a shocking, commanding moment the night John had learned about Mary—a moment when Sherlock had ripped the dynamic of their conversation away from John and his rage, a moment when he’d forced John to stop making it personal—to start making it about Mary’s need, not about John’s anger. Sherlock hurt and needing and angry and demanding….and right.

He wondered what his friend had been right about when the secret artist had seen him.

“Who sees the Holmes family like this?” Mary asked, frowning. “I can’t imagine them ever opening themselves up to this.”

“I can’t imagine Sherlock keeping it, much less giving it to you,” John said, glancing at Lestrade. “He’s not one for sharing. Not things like this.”

“Look at this one,” Lestrade said, and pulled out an earlier one—the artist was clearly only half-trained, but that clever eye and supple line quality were still there, shining hesitantly out of less confident work.

A boy of about twelve sat on the ground, legs crossed, with a younger boy in his lap. The artist hadn’t quite got the perspective or the anatomy quite right, but it was evocative—gentle hands holding squirming, laughing brother close. The faces were overworked—whoever it was had fought hard to capture something. John wasn’t sure he was seeing all that had been intended, but there was a sweetness and a love there he would not have expected. He’d always tended to imagine Mycroft as a little prissy, in a miniature three-piece suit with short-pants and a mini-brolly, nose in the air, complaining about Sherlock being too messy or too noisy or too stupid—a caricature of a frustrated man in his mid-forties rather than anything honestly likely in a boy growing up in the seventies and eighties. This drawing was more plausible: long legs in cuffed safari shorts, clunky leather sandals over bony ankles, long arms with pointy elbows all came together to cage a squealing armful of giggling, flailing curls. John had a sister of his own, and he was a rough and tumble kid. He recognized that they boys were right at the bitter edge between play and a squabble. Sherlock could shift from laughter to resistance in a flash of frustration. Mycroft could push just a bit too hard and turn it from a game to a trap. But there, then, right at that moment, they were poised perfectly, two brothers at play.

“Poor babies,” Mary murmured, softly. “Poor, poor babies.”

“What?” Lestrade looked at her. “What do you mean?”

Mary grabbed up pages, dug down further, and arranges them. “Look—it all went too fast for them, somehow. Something went wrong, and they didn’t have time or a safe place to pick it all back up.”

John looked over her shoulder, watching her finger trace from drawing to drawing. Yes, he can see it—something in the flow from page to page—two children grown up too soon, facing feelings too wild, dangers too potent, and the look of solitude: they didn’t see themselves as having anything but each other—and each other wasn’t enough.

“You have no idea who drew them?” John asked.

“Only that Sherlock and Mycroft both knew the artist—and it mattered. And that they aren’t talking.”

“Whoever it was had the eye,” Mary said. “May I copy these? I want to ask some friends if they know that hand—that line. That style. That’s someone who could have been a pro. Should have gone for training.”

“Yeah, sure,” Lestrade said. “I…if you find anything, let me know, yeah? Printer-scanner’s over there, on the file cabinets.”

Mary nodded, and moved over, taking over Lestrade’s chair and his keyboard and monitor, standing to change pages over every so often.

Lestrade drew one last drawing out. “They really were good,” he said. “Whoever did it.” He held the picture out to John.

John shivered. All the other drawings had included Sherlock somewhere. This was a bust of Mycroft, and it was Mycroft drawn by the artist at his or her most mature and capable. Mycroft at perhaps his mid-to-late thirties? His hairline had just begun to recede. He was dressed in business clothes—a spread collar formal shirt, a fat full-Windsor tie with a dimple neatly set in place, the line of a waistcoat and the curve of a lapel just sketched in. He was calm, composed, dignified—and his eyes screamed some sorrow John couldn’t place. Below the drawing, in a hand that, like the drawing style, spoke of both control and lyric elegance, was written, “There is nothing to forgive, Mike. Go in peace. Yours, always—the Other One.”

“What the hell is that about?” John asked. “The other _what?_ ”

“Don’t ask me,” Lestrade sighed. “I’ve got no clue.” He looked sadly down, and added. “Whoever it was, whatever the hell happened—it mattered, didn’t it?”

Lestrade looked at the portrait of Mycroft—a Mycroft dying inside of some grief too big to encompass. He thought of Sherlock and Mycroft—and his mind darted between the laughing, giggling tickle fight to the squabbling, damaged men he knew.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it did.”

Mary copied the scans to a disk, and slipped it into her purse.

The three looked at each other.

“It changes things,” Mary said. “How I think of them.”

“Maybe that’s why they don’t want the pictures,” Lestrade said, softly. “It changes how they think of themselves, too.”

John just grunted, and walked Mary to the car. But he lay in their bed that night, looking up at the ceiling, thinking of two boys and the other one, and about all the lost love caught in the graphite lines laid down years before. The artist was lost…John feared the artist was dead. And something had gone out of Sherlock’s and Mycroft’s lives that had never come back, and never been forgotten.

He wondered what grave, empty or full, marked Sherlock and Mycroft’s grief.

 

*So it’s like this. Once upon a time, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in London was located at an address in a court called “Scotland Yard.” So, not surprisingly at all, headquarters was called “Scotland Yard,” and it became synonymous with the investigative departments of the police. Then, time and growth doing what time and growth do, the original offices proved too small and too old and the administration and much of the investigation divisions moved out to—yes—NEW Scotland Yard, in 1967. They didn’t own the building in total, though, until 2008, and now they’re selling it as part of an attempt to make budget cuts, and the headquarters (largely administrative) are moving to a smaller building on the Thames (as are MI5 and MI6’s respective headquarters buildings….) I understand, perhaps incorrectly, that the investigative work is no longer really centralized in headquarters. But it’s still to some degree seen as “Scotland Yard,” and BBC *Sherlock* has always chosen to leave the impression that, well, Greg “Scotland Yard” Lestrade works at “Scotland Yard.” So as he’s gone up another level during the hiatus, (he’s DCI Lestrade according to the papers (thanks for pointing it out, Mice!)), I’m giving him one office in the old headquarters and a spiffed up, refurbished on in the downsized but spiffed up and refurbished new headquarters on the Thames.


End file.
